In recent years the market of the semiconductor industry has grown considerably for supplying integrated chips to companies that manufacture portable electronic device. The integrated chips used to make these portable electronic device, such as cell phones, PDAs, laptop computers and the like, are mostly made in emerging technology nodes. This is because emerging technology nodes offer higher density chips with greater performance and lower power consumption. These qualities are important to portable electronic devices which are continually striving to offer greater functionality while relying on relatively small energy sources (e.g., batteries). The demand for these products has driven the industry to devote many resources to developing low power integrated chips, often resulting in specific integration processes.
One aspect of power consumption in integrated circuits is the power consumption of memory cells. Memory can be broadly grouped into two categories, volatile memory and non-volatile memory. Volatile memory (e.g., SRAM, DRAM) is memory which requires power to retain its information. Non-volatile memory (e.g., EEPROM, flash) is memory which does not require power to retain its information. In recent years, the use of non-volatile memory has become common place in portable electronics. Many portable electronic devices such as cell phones or digital cameras will rely upon a stick or card which uses flash memory as storage. Unfortunately, the performance and density of flash memory and other wide spread commercially available non-volatile memory sources lags behind that of volatile memory.
In recent years, semiconductor research has increased its emphasis on ferroelectric memory as an alternative to commercially available non-volatile memories. Ferroelectric random-access memory (FRAM) is a non-volatile random access memory that offers advantages in terms of power consumption and write speed over existing non-volatile memory sources such as flash or EEPROM. There are still obstacles standing in the way of FRAM becoming an important part of the memory market, but its potential advantages point towards it as a possible contender for the future of non-volatile memory.